


Spy vs Spy

by Ranni



Category: Avengers, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, And he also LOVES, Bloody noses and broken bones, Gen, Happy Ending, Hurt Clint Barton, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Manipulative Nick Fury, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, Nick Fury Lies, No "onscreen" torture this time, Not Canon Compliant, Not compliant with ANYTHING EVER, POV Phil Coulson, Phil Coulson & Nick Fury Friendship, Phil Coulson Needs a Hug, Protective Natasha Romanov, Protective Phil Coulson, SHIELD, Strike Team Delta, String Art and Conspiracy Theories, Team as Family, spy vs spy - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2019-06-22 19:16:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15588867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ranni/pseuds/Ranni
Summary: That’s what Phil can offer. Mock annoyance. What he wants is to urge Natasha to wash that dye from her hair, to smooth the dark circles from beneath her eyes. Phil wants to examine Clint’s broken fingers and fume that they could have been set more cleanly had he been there to help. He wants to hug them. But Clint and Natasha are trained assassins, he is Phil Coulson, this is SHIELD. Banter is the best he can offer.-or-After being emotionally gutted by Endgame, let's have a fic where everyone loves one another and everything ends happily.





	1. Chapter 1

*

**Winter**

Phil Coulson ladles himself a cup of punch and—yep. Spiked already. He sighs. The Director is going to have an absolute shitfit.

Agent Carson is assigned to guard duty and, to her credit, doesn't flinch at Phil's narrowed eyes. "I didn't see a thing."

"Of  _course_ not."

He wanders away to lean against one streamer-festooned wall before having a second sip—the drink is already poured; he might as well enjoy it. It _is_ the End of the World, after all.

There are too many countries and religions and cultures represented in SHIELD to honor them all, so somewhere along the line the agency had created its own traditions. There are four officially sanctioned holidays—each with a corresponding party—because they need a united reason to celebrate, an excuse to cut loose every three months. The End of the World Party is SHIELD’s answer to Christmas and New Year’s; an acknowledgement of their own successes and an unsubtle dig at all the hysterics who inevitably claim that _this_ will be the year the world finally falls apart.

Director Carter had forbidden all alcohol after what Nick Fury—one of the few people left from those days—still claims was a very memorable and emotionally devastating agency-wide limbo contest. Not that an agency full of hyper-creative and intelligent individuals has any trouble skirting any rule they choose, and the spiking of the punchbowl is as much a tradition as the parties themselves.

The music is lively enough to tempt people out on the dance floor, and several pairs of senior agents show off the fancier steps they’ve learned for undercover work, a crowd gathering and whooping appreciatively. There are a lot of flushed faces and bright eyes, but no one is too drunk yet. Phil allows himself the hope that the night will end without a brawl; the drinking may go unmentioned if nothing terrible comes of it.

The next guard shows up to relieve Carson—they’re assigned to only fifteen minute shifts; even _Nick_ isn’t cruel enough to pull people out of the party altogether—and Phil finishes his drink hurriedly, intent on putting the fear of God into the new man.

He’s only halfway to the table when he stumbles over a pair of legs sticking out from under the partially retracted conference room curtain.

“Hello,” comes a rather nasal voice, presumably from the owner of the legs.

“Who is that?" Phil pushes the heavy curtain aside to reveal a youngish man holding a red, dripping cocktail napkin to his face. "What are you doing under there?"

“My partner zigged when I zagged; I’m waiting for this sonofabitch to stop spurting.” The man pulls the napkins away to reveal a gushing nosebleed, wide grin, and a face Phil recognizes from countless forms floating across his desk. He’s never met Clint Barton personally.

Phil extends a handkerchief fished from his pocket. “That’s a lot of blood. Maybe you should go to Medical.”

“Nah, that’s okay,” Barton says cheerfully and Phil’s stomach does a slow roll as red steadily seeps down the white of the handkerchief. “My friend was going to get some more napkins, but she never—oh, _there_ she is.”

Phil straightens up as Natasha Romanov brushes by, a glance of simultaneous assessment and dismissal her only acknowledgement of his presence. She’s carrying a wad of wet, brown paper towels, undoubtedly liberated from the nearest bathroom, and drops them unceremoniously on the floor by Barton’s head with a sodden _plop_.

“Well, I can see you’re in good hands, so—” Phil gestures vaguely back toward the party. “Feel free to keep that,” he adds, nodding toward the handkerchief before briefly returning Barton’s grin.

When Phil makes it to the refreshment table there’s a brand new bowl of punch, lime flavored this time.

And it’s already spiked.

 

*

 “I want to know who’s responsible.” Nick Fury pounds the table for emphasis, sending everyone’s coffee cups rattling and half a dozen eyes closing in brief agony.

Phil resists the impulse to rub his forehead, wishing he’d accepted the Tylenol that Sitwell offered on their way into the meeting. “As far as we can tell it’s a coordinated effort.”

A _long-term_ coordinated effort, he does not add—the spiking of the punch appears to have started the same day as the alcohol prohibition, and has not been hindered in the slightest by the best efforts of a line of angry SHIELD directors.

“I want additional guards stationed around the punchbowl at the next party. They can keep each other accountable.  Offer an incentive for turning one another in.” Fury waves vaguely, too irate for details. “An extra day of personal leave or something. I don’t fucking know.” He slams his hand down on the table one last time, hard enough that Phil’s coffee finally sloshes over the rim of his cup to soak a stack of meeting agendas. “But the drinking stops _now._ Coulson, send out a memo.”

 

**Spring**

*

The party has already started and Phil just…doesn’t go. _Five more minutes_ , he thinks, sorting through stacks of papers, then looks up at the clock only to find that twenty have passed.

The phone rings. He lets it ring. It’s undoubtedly Jasper, wondering when Phil is going to show up.

There’s a knock on his door, polite and quiet enough to be easily ignored.

Another phone call. Probably Fury this time, ready to threaten bodily harm if Phil doesn’t appear.

Phil tells himself that he doesn’t want to go because pounding music is unlikely to help his gnawing headache. That he doesn’t want to hear the tittering laughter that inevitably turns into guffaws and whoops as everyone gets more intoxicated and progressively carefree. He tells himself that Hayfever’s Eve is his least favorite faux-holiday due to all the Kleenex that gets tossed around—it covers the floor and creates an agency-wide slipping hazard as well as leaves lint all over everyone’s clothing.

Phil tells himself all of those things are the reasons why he’s avoiding the party, avoiding people.

He tells himself that it _isn’t_ because of the notice on his desk, because of grouping of teeny tiny pixels that merge together to form the boring blandness of an employee identification photo. It  _isn't_ because no matter how long he looks he can’t recognize Caroline McPhail at all.

Phil was technically her superior officer—though removed through various layers of management and handlers—but had never actually met her. Maybe, if he stares long enough, he’ll realize that he’d seen her around and just not known it, will recognize her from the cafeteria or hallways or gym. Then again, maybe she never looked anything like her ID photo—who does, after all?—and Phil would recognize her immediately if he could see her in real life, chatting and smiling or laughing. Maybe he’d recognize her more easily if the large black **DECEASED** printed beside the photo wasn’t so distracting.

He used to be able to pair faces to all the names of the paper people that travel across his desk, but there’s too many of them now. What had been a lean and tightknit community of agents ten years ago is now a shaky pyramid of footsoldiers and administrators, the numbers of both approaching unwieldy proportions. When Phil gets up to speak at all staff meetings he can't identify most of the people looking back at him.

The door suddenly explodes inward, kicked by the large black boot of a scowling SHIELD director. “Where the hell were _you_?” Nick’s shoulders are still glittery from the confetti shower that signals the end of the party, and Phil grits his teeth at the thought of it raining down all over the office carpet.

“Catching up on paperwork.” He rearranges the stacks smoothly, covering Caroline McPhail’s picture. “I thought it’d be a better use of my time than drinking and dancing.”

Nick scowls at Phil’s desk, at his face, at the world in general. “Four times a year the agency gets to have fun and you just _don’t go_. What the hell, Coulson? It’s almost like you’re—”

“Did anyone spike the punch?” Phil interrupts, indulging the one and only interest in the party in the first place.

“ _Yes_.” The switch from brooding to rapturous anger is abrupt and over the top in the way that is completely unique to Nick Fury. “There was even a Conga line!” The Director is practically apoplectic at the thought, but when he glares at Phil there’s almost something mischievous in his eyes. “We need to put out another memo. This shit _has_ to stop.”

 

**Summer**

*****

The memo goes out, but the shit does not stop.

This time the punch isn’t just spiked—it seems that the enterprising prankster has gone so far as to exchange the entire bowl of punch for one of wine. Phil finds himself jostled until he collides with an elbow that’s hastily relocated, the owner not spilling so much as a drop of her wine in the process.

“Pardon me, Agent Romanov." Her unfriendliness is legendary at SHIELD, but she smiles politely enough before gathering the skirt of her dress in her other hand and tugging gently. Phil feels his own foot rock and realizes with horror that he’s standing on her hem. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry!”

“Think nothing of it.” She smiles again before moving her gaze back out to the dance floor, finished with the conversation, finished with him. 

“Where’s your other half?” he asks, and she glances back at him briefly, eyes narrowed uncertainly.  “Your partner. Is he on the dance floor? Or hiding under another curtain?”

Romanov smiles again, more genuinely this time. “He isn’t feeling well. I’d be with him now, but I already had the dress. And I couldn’t very well pass up my chance to enjoy all this…” She waves vaguely toward the gaudily decorated room, the drunken dancers. “….splendor.”

“Of course not; no one could.”

They exchange another polite smile before falling into a companionable silence, watching everyone else laugh and mingle and twirl one another around. Phil catches sight of Nick frowning at them from across the room; Romanov must notice him as well, because she stiffens almost imperceptibly before inclining her head back toward the punch bowl and holding up her now empty cup.

“Excuse me.”

And like that, she’s gone.  Phil spots her a few more times during his halfhearted mingling—she's always hovering motionlessly around the edges of the action, leaning against walls and tables. Drinking cheap wine. Watching. The party is over and she’s disappeared before Phil figures out why the whole thing unsettles him so.

Natasha Romanov was the most beautiful person in the room and nobody asked her to dance.

 

*

 “Have you ever met Barton?” Nick’s voice booms suddenly.

“Clint Barton?” Phil’s lips twist wryly at Nick’s fleetingly pursed expression of displeasure at his non-reaction; the director’s unannounced bursting into offices has inspired more than one hysterical response around the agency. “Archer. Sniper. Pilot. Yeah, I’ve met him.” He pictures the agent’s legs sticking out from his half-heartedly selected hiding place beneath the divider curtain and his smirk turns into a more genuine smile. “Well, sort of, anyway.”

“He got fucked up on his last mission and Medical grounded him to base. That pulls Romanov out of rotation, too. I have a project I want you all to collaborate on.” 

 

*

Phil hasn’t been in the field in a long time, but he recognizes the aftermath of captivity and torture all too well—clusters of bruises, hooded eyes, taut cheekbones that point toward too much weight dropped too fast. When Barton takes a hand off one of his crutches and leans on the other to shake hands, Phil finds himself gripping too gingerly in response to the man's frail state, but Barton grins as easily as he had six months ago at the party. He straightens in surprise at the finger poked into his back before taking an awkward, shuffling, step further into the Phil’s office to make room for Romanov, who storms in and pulls Barton forward in the same fluid movement.

“Do you mind? He’s not supposed to put any weight on the leg.”

She doesn’t wait for an answer before stacking the file folders strewn over the couch with one hand while maintaining a deathgrip on Barton’s elbow with the other.  She also has fading bruises on her face, obviously hidden by skillful makeup application the week before. She gets Barton settled as Phil deposits the folders on his desk in an untidy pile and turns to face the two assassins he’s been assigned for an off-book, eyes-only project.

 “So…where do we start?” Romanov asks.

Phil takes in her weary suspicion and the way Barton’s eager, interested expression is as odds with his hollow eyes and unknowingly makes the decision that leads to the rest of it.

 “We start with a pizza.”

 

*

Three weeks later they’ve eaten many different takeout meals together. Now that they’ve stopped dancing around introductions and reciting highly edited autobiographies they’ve focused on their assignment, and it’s not going at all like Phil imagined. He figured it would be a wild goose chase, busywork assigned by Nick in petty retaliation for not properly enjoying his parties. What he didn’t imagine this time would be is… _fun_.

They treat it as an op, even though it’s after hours, and Natasha has her shoes off and Clint is wearing a pair of red pajama pants with one leg cut off to accommodate his cast. Phil stands in front of his whiteboard—his thirty-seven point To Do list having been erased without a second thought prior to the agents’ evening arrival—with an eggroll in one hand and a dry erase marker in the other. “Alright, what do we _know_?”

“The punch doesn’t start off spiked. Guards are assigned. No one has ever been caught.”

Phil nods in agreement as he writes, the marker squeaking. “And what have we _heard_?” He directs this toward Clint, well liked at SHIELD and therefore more likely to have his ear to the ground than the famously unfriendly Black Widow.

To his credit, Barton tries for an innocent expression, mouth full of food and eyes wide with a _Are you talking to_ ME? expression that dies quickly at Natasha’s stony glare and Phil’s more bemused one. He swallows his food and scrubs hastily at his mouth with a napkin. “Look, all I know—and this is second and third hand, okay? Don’t, like, take any of this as _gospel_ here—is that the person that does the spiking is different each holiday. A few weeks before the party a bottle of alcohol and postcard mysteriously appears, saying they’ve been chosen by the Mastermind to take care of the punch. They have to figure out how to do it and to try to get it done at the beginning of the party. Otherwise they could just get assigned to guard duty and wait for their shift, right?”

“Is that all?” Natasha asks, and swipes Phil’s stapler off his desk to loom threateningly over her partner. “Is that _all_ you’ve heard?”

“Okay, it was Bobbi Morse that spiked it at the last End of the World.” He makes a darting grab for the stapler as Natasha holds it just out of reach, snapping at his fingertips. “She confirmed the postcard thing but didn’t know anything else.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.” Phil writes _anonymous note_ and _Morse_ in the KNOWN column, keeping one eye on the agents’ escalating battle for stapler dominance. “That’s what we know and have heard, but what do we _think_? Who's the one pulling the strings?"

“I think Mastermind is Jasper Sitwell,” Clint says immediately, confidently. “He fits the profile. It’s him. It’s Sitwell, he’s the guy.” He dusts his hands together triumphantly and picks up his takeout just as Natasha leans over to rapidly fire a staple into the container.

“ _I_ don't think Mastermind is an Agent at all,” Phil counters. “It’s someone in clerical or maintenance or finance…someone that can fly under the radar.  Agents are _expected_ to be sneaky.  The lady serving casserole every Tuesday night is not.”

Clint hums appreciatively, picking the staple out of his food and tucking it under the splint on his hand, sure to be produced for some terrible retribution at some inappropriate time. “Okay, then I’m changing my vote to Mike Porter, the air conditioning guy.”

“How about you?” Phil asks Natasha. “Who do you think Mastermind is?”

Her smile is all the more dazzling for being so rare. “If I didn’t know any better, I would think that he was _you_.”

 

*

**Fall**

*

They’ve gone full-tilt with it now, the nearest thing to “play” that Phil Coulson has allowed himself in thirty years.

Natasha presses the color coded post-it notes to the wall Phil has cleared for this specific purpose, removing years’ worth of layered policy posters and OSHA reminders. Phil connects the post-its laboriously with taut pieces of string while Clint bosses them both from his spot on the couch, so obviously desperate to participate directly that they forgive his constant critiques. The end result is colorful and expansive and ridiculous, like something out of a bad movie, and they all sit together to take it in for a long moment, admiring.

“It’s fucking _beautiful_.” Clint Barton’s face is a study in unbridled delight.

“It’s certainly a first for me,” Phil admits, winking at Natasha. “Frankly, up to this moment, SHIELD has been a disappointment as far as conspiracy walls go. ‘Spy vs Spy’ and James Bond led me to believe there’d be a lot more string art in my day to day duties.”

Natasha nods, taking in their work with amusement and something like pride, a smile tugging at her lips. “Tomorrow’s the big day,” she says out of nowhere, and Phil’s confused until he realizes she’s talking about the cast on Clint’s leg.

The archer drags his fingernails up and down the wrapped plaster dramatically. “Once they take this sonofabitch off I’m going to do nothing but scratch and scratch and scratch as hard as I want, as long as I want. It’s gonna be _heaven_.”

Phil’s happy for Clint. He is. The spiral fracture took far longer to heal than the other bones, still immobilized long after stitches were removed and cuts healed into pink lines, long after teeth were sculpted and placed by patient SHIELD dentists. The removal of the cast means the beginning of return to normality for Clint, sidelined and forced into unwilling inactivity for so long. But it also means that a sundown has been called on the not-a-mission and easy comradery they’ve enjoyed for months now.

Natasha and Clint will return to the field, and Phil will be reduced to paperwork for evening company.

He’s quiet too long and Natasha follows his eyeline to the stacks on his desk, neatly ordered but neverending.

“Where does it go?” she asks. “You’re the last person to deal with it, so where does it end up?"

He's never really thought about what happens to it  _after_. "To Records. They have a warehouse somewhere."

"Rows of boxes, miles long and miles high." Clint grins up at Phil with a wry twist of his mouth that looks more like Natasha's gallows humor than his own usual exuberance. He drops his eyes just as suddenly back to the cast on his leg, picking at the edges, where the blue tint has long since been worried away. "What the hell is it all  _for?_ "

“Look,” Phil says finally, flustered and not quite sure why, “someone has to be the one to keep watch. And it can’t be Fury. Someone has to gather up all the pieces at the end and sort them back into the big picture so that it all means something. Someone has to be the person at the end that _sees_.”

“And _you_ are SHIELD’s person,” Natasha surmises.

Phil sighs, his eyes joining the others' to focus on Clint's cast. “Yeah. That’s what I am.”

 

*

They stop by after leaving Medical and Phil is suitably admiring of Clint’s too-skinny, freshly freed leg. They’ve shared so many dinners at this point that he doesn’t think twice about suggesting “Lunch?”, but their expressions suddenly go cagey and they exchange a long, meaningful look. “It’s no big deal if you already have plans,” Phil adds hurriedly.

“We don’t,” Natasha says immediately, and Clint nods along readily enough before glancing at the clock above Phil’s head.

“But?” Phil prompts.

“We’re not usually free around lunchtime and…” Clint shrugs, a little embarrassed, “…we were thinking we could…” His face turns bright red but he still laughs when Phil suddenly understands.

Like the clandestine punch spiking there’s another open secret at SHIELD—an agency wide obsession with soap operas. Their lives are often too chaotic to enjoy television involving a plot to keep track off, but soaps are so repetitive and slow moving that an agent can miss a month of episodes and jump right back in when they return from an op. Phil may or may not have participated in his fair share of community viewings back when he was on a team, but he put all of those things away with his move to management.

“You should come, too,” Natasha offers, and the automatic refusal is already on Phil’s lips when it dies at the sight of the Clint’s hand, extended toward him.

“Come with us. SHIELD can spare you for one hour. You can be _our_ person, too.”

And that’s how Philip J. Coulson, level seven agent and legendary tight ass of SHIELD ends up sitting in the midst of thirty coworkers, watching soap operas on a Wednesday afternoon. They congregate in the west lounge—the east lounge already being full of people watching the same program—Natasha and Phil commandeering the last open loveseat with Clint sitting on the floor in front of them, his still-weak leg stuck out in everyone’s way.

As the opening credits of “The Heart is a Lonely Rose” ring out the wave of nostalgia hits painfully, reminding Phil too much of his own rookie days, parked in a crowd just like this one, every face one he knew well. But just as suddenly as the melancholy descends it is washed away by his surprise at spotting a face he _does_ know.

“Stone Rothschild!” Phil yelps, and a roomful of heads swivel toward him. “That guy was on the show the last time I watched—and that was seven years ago!” Clint tips his head backwards and sends Phil an upside down grin. “Is he still married to Bridget?” Phil asks him, half teasing.

“ _Bridget_!” someone calls mock horror, and there is scattered, good-natured laughter. “They got divorced _ages_ ago. Stone is married to Adrianna St. Clair now.”

“And Bridget is married to Roderigo Santa Cruz,” Jasper Sitwell adds, worming his way in between two maintenance workers while balancing a coffee cup and wrapped sandwich. “They started their own fashion house and it’s been war ever since.”

“That’s only because Adrianna used to be married to Christian, before he kidnapped—"

Phil’s head swims from rapid fire conversation and the cacophony of smells—most people are sitting with various microwaved meals balanced on their laps—but it’s fun all the same, everyone hooting and jeering and trashtalking characters. He’d almost forgotten this part of SHIELD, the part that unites in pursuit of something meaningless and harmless and fun.

The room falls almost comically silent during an actress’ beautiful, drawn-out death scene, everyone’s breath held. Then someone wails “Bianca, _noooooo_ _!"_ , breaking the mood, and Phil Coulson laughs out loud.

“She’ll be back,” Clint says sagely, and a dozen heads bob in agreement. “That’s rule number one in Soapland—if you don’t see a body actually go in the ground, they’re still alive.”

“Ageless words of wisdom,” Natasha observes solemnly, and winks in Phil’s direction. “The world needs to hear about this.”

“I’ll send out the memo.”  

*


	2. Chapter 2

 

*

Phil and Clint are pressed against a corner in the underground parking garage, deliberately not making face to face contact with their shadowy mystery informant.

“All I know,” a gruff, vaguely familiar voice whispers, “is that a few days before the party a letter goes out, telling someone that they’ve been chosen. Sometimes there’s a bottle of alcohol, too, if Mastermind has a special request.”

“Dude, we knew that already. Give us something _new_!”

“Who’s doing it?” Phil demands, flapping a silencing hand at Clint. “Who’s the person behind it all?”

“Look, I’ve told you all I know.” The voice pauses, fraught. “And even that’s probably too much.”

Clint crows with unbridled delight, and Phil barely resists the impulse to demand _How can I contact you again_?  or some other shitty spy movie line. There’s a scuffling noise around the corner and the echo of rapidly retreating footsteps, and Phil gives in and laughs along, happy because Clint is, happy that they still have this, the goofy quest that brought the three of them together, that the game is every bit as thrilling as it was when it began two years ago.

He hopes it never ends.

 

*

For every bloody, high octane assignment there are ten like this one—dressing as someone else, living as someone else, and then dramatically dismantling the entire façade.

Phil and Clint do most of the heavy lifting, posing as American investors in Colombia, interested in setting up an English speaking resort with a hearty sideline of drugs. Natasha is on hand to make the occasional cameo as Phil’s desirable mistress, but spends most of her time being bored out of her mind in a luxurious penthouse.  

She’s the one who discovers the telenovela and forces her partners to watch, and Strike Team Delta spends five months interfacing with bankers and drug lords during the day and all night parked in front of the television.

  _El Corazon es una Rosa Solitaria_ has been on for decades and seems to have an episode playing at all hours of the day and Natasha records them all dutifully, scours the internet for relevant details. Sometimes Phil rallies and forces a talk about strategy, but they _know_ the plan, they know how to carry it out, they know what to do if everything falls apart, know the inevitable way this will all end. What they _don’t_ know is if Juan Carlos Martinez Esperanza, owner of the most glorious mustache on earth, will ever keep his family’s vineyard out of the clutches of the scheming Ines de la Torre Gomez Rodriguez. Or if Sergio Diego Maradona Carbonell will ever win the affections of the doe-eyed Luz Eugenia, who keeps getting kidnapped (usually by the still scheming Ines de la Torre Gomez Rodriguez).

Natasha, with too much time on her hands and bored of the kept-woman lifestyle, joins online discussion forums and takes people to task all day, everyday, about _Rosa Solitaria_ minutiae while Clint takes to mimicking Juan Carlos’ dramatic facial expressions in response to the most innocuous daily conversations. Phil picks up the overly flowery language and calls Natasha and Clint his _preciosos_ , his _cari_ _ños_ , his _tesoros,_ and the three of them laugh, happy enough to pretend that it’s just a game, that it doesn’t mean anything.

The op ends with an uneventful mass arrest coordinated with Colombian police, the most danger being a few colorful threats tossed Phil’s direction. Clint calls Natasha and she has the penthouse packed up and a quinjet en route before Phil and Clint have even left the scene. They’re halfway through the flight home before Clint nudges Natasha’s foot with his own.

“How did it end?”

The show, of _course_ he’s talking about the show, and Clint sounds regretful and a little sad, as if the internet doesn’t exist for him look up a synopsis or perhaps even watch the episodes themselves. As if the show is ending along with the op, as if it will cease to exist because they aren’t there to see it.

“Ines was shot.” Natasha dusts her hands together neatly, delighted at the convenience of it, a thing all wrapped up and resolved, and just in time for their departure. “Juan Carlos won’t have to worry about _her_ anymore. And now Luz can marry Sergio.”

Clint hums thoughtfully and rubs at the short beard he’s worn for months—ready to shave it off and be done with it, ready to be Clint Barton instead of Elliot McAllister, ready to put it aside along with the show and the penthouse and all this time together. Natasha’s back in her tac uniform, a jarring change after high heels and sundresses and expensive jewelry, and even her voice is different, the detached way she relayed the information so unlike her previously breathless reports. Clint and Natasha are ready to go home again, ready for it to be over.

And for some reason, to Phil, that suddenly doesn’t seem okay.

“Did you see it?” Natasha raises an eyebrow and Phil clarifies, “Ines’ death. Did you see her actual body go into a coffin?”

She blinks at him, somewhere between amused and offended, while Clint pauses scrubbing at his face, his eyes moving between her and Phil, interested.

“She was shot in the heart, Coulson. She’s dead.”

“Maybe.” Phil shrugs.

 “Ines fell off the pier and her body was swept out to sea.” Natasha glares meaningfully at Clint, who widens his eyes and raises his hands in the universal signal for _This is_ _not my fight_. “So if she wasn’t killed outright, then she drowned anyway.”

“…Possibly.” Phil probably shouldn’t enjoy carefully provoking the Black Widow as much as he does.

 “The waters were shark infested.” Natasha points for emphasis, really getting heated now, or as heated as she ever gets. “There was a sign posted right where she fell in. The camera really lingered on the shot!”

“I remain unconvinced,” Phil says apologetically, and Clint hastily resumes scrubbing at his jaw to hide a smile.

“And,” she goes on, her voice raised against the roar of the quinjet, “you may recall that Ines was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor just two days ago! So even if the sharks and the bullet don’t get her—”

 “Hey, I don’t make the rules here.” Phil spreads his hands helplessly as Clint gives in and laughs aloud. The corner of Natasha’s mouth twitches up unwillingly. “It’s the number one rule in Soapland—they’re only dead if you see a body go into the ground…and maybe not even then.”

 

*

“Not everyone is meant to be in the field,” Phil says as kindly as possible. He nudges the box of tissues nearer to the weeping woman, who ignores it in favor of wiping at her eyes with her fingertips. She peeks at them just long enough to see if her mascara is running, then resumes her theatrical sobs. “Some people’s talents are better used elsewhere.”

Phil Coulson will not attempt to rub away the headache growing directly between his eyebrows. He will not tap his foot or bounce his knee, he will not gnaw on a pen, and he certainly will not sigh with frustration at Marianne, who won’t stop crying. Phil absolutely will not do any of those things, though he very very very much wants to do them all. Instead he’ll finish the task that Fury fobbed off onto him and cut Marianne Sanderson from the covert ops training program.

“And there are still many fine departments that could utilize your wit and intelligence and obvious devotion to SHIELD. Logistics, perhaps.”

The desk phone illuminates into silent life and Phil glances at the display. There’s a callback number—Phil recognizes it immediately as Natasha’s cell phone—and suddenly it’s all he can do not to hurry this meeting along, not to throw the box of tissues at Marianne’s head and tell her to pull herself together, to get the hell out of his office. Clint and Natasha have been gone for weeks on one of their rare missions without Phil, and he wants his team inside this office as much as he wants this weepy recruit out of it.

But she’s still sobbing loudly, now wiping the back of her hand across her nose and as he fights his features from twisting into a moue of disgust Phil realizes that she’s doing all this deliberately. Maybe she’s a better actress than they’d thought.

The phone flashes again, this time with the numerical message 07734. Too short to be a phone number, not long enough to be anyone’s SHIELD ID number. Phil blinks at the numbers, trying to will them into making sense, something about them nagging and familiar.

“I feel like I wasn’t given enough of a chance,” Marianne manages between shuddery breaths. “If Director Fury could just—”

Phil is looking at her sympathetically—but not _too_ sympathetically, or she’ll never let this go—but he isn’t listening at all, still turning those numbers over in his mind. And that’s the answer, suddenly—turning them over. Decades ago Phil Coulson exchanged many funny messages to his classmates via calculators displayed furtively or passed from hand to hand. 07734. All they had to do was flip the calculator upside down and squint at the numbers for them to become HELLO.

Phil stares at Marianne and fights a smile. And he wins the fight, but barely.

“—Sitwell said he could find a place for me but I want to be in _ops_ , not—”

The phone flashes again with another message, this time 5508 07734.

 HELLO BOSS.

Marianne eyes the phone balefully. “I guess you have to go. Someone keeps calling. I guess it’s important.” Her injured sniff comes at the same time as 80085.

It’s one of the rare calculator words that can be read upright, and Phil Coulson recognizes BOOBS as readily today as when he was a smirking twelve-year-old with a gray Casio calculator. And while the original callback number may have been Natasha’s, this particular message has Clint Barton’s fingerprints all over it.

“You’re still upset, I don’t mind talking some more.” Except he does. His ass aches from sitting at his desk and in meetings all day, and, due to the same meetings, he’s missed both dinner and lunch. Also his friends have just returned home after being gone for weeks. Phil does mind. A lot.

37047734 (HELLHOLE) comes next, followed immediately by 3704558 (ASSHOLE).

There’s a faint scuffling noise from the hall and Phil isn’t sure if he actually hears their laughter or his mind is just supplying it, along with the image of Clint and Natasha wrestling over her phone, eager to be the one to type in the next message.

“No, I guess we’re done.” Marianne’s tears end abruptly and miraculously, and while she still looks a little annoyed, she’s also resigned. Phil hastens to stand when she does, his desire to get out to the hallway masquerading as chivalry.

Clint and Natasha aren’t even pretending to do be doing anything other than waiting when the door opens. Natasha gives Marianne a brief dismissive glance before smiling at Phil. Her red hair has been colored black, making her look sallow, haunted. Clint has several splinted fingers on his left hand.

“I bet those hurt to type with,” Phil scolds, raising his eyebrows in disapproval.

That’s what he can offer. A joke.  Mock annoyance. What he wants is to urge Natasha to wash that dye from her hair, to smooth the dark circles from beneath her eyes. Phil wants to examine Clint’s broken fingers and fume that they could have been set more cleanly had he been there to help. He wants to hug them. But Clint and Natasha are trained assassins, he is Phil Coulson, this is SHIELD. Banter is all he can offer.

Clint waves the observation away as unimportant. Of course typing had hurt, and of course it had been worth it.

“Food,” Natasha demands. “Now.”

 

*

“I think it’s Nick Fury.” 

They’d missed the latest holiday party while off in whatever pocket of the world they’d been folded into (India, it was India—Phil hadn’t even lasted a week before he accessed classified info to find out), but Phil had updated them immediately on the latest End of the World celebration. There had been copious drinking that culminated in three hundred SHIELD employees singing, jumping, and drunkenly group-hugging along to “Sweet Caroline”. The whole thing had left the Director in a thunderous mood for days afterward.

 “Christ.” Clint drops his fork to scrub at his face carefully with seven fingers. “I feel like crap. I might be sick. I might be _dying_.”

He looks worn out, but not particularly unwell. A sick Barton is usually a very subdued one, his frowns growing deeper and his words further and further apart before he’ll finally, very grudgingly, admit to illness. On the other hand, an openly complaining Barton has a purpose—usually to annoy Natasha or make Phil laugh, but every so often he does so to communicate something obliquely.

“You do look tired.” Phil passes over his dinner roll, which Clint accepts immediately despite having two of his own.

Natasha ignores them both. “Being the Mastermind would allow Director Fury to indulge in all his favorite pastimes simultaneously.” She holds up her fingers and enumerates, “Lying to people, sneaking around, and yelling at everyone afterward.”

“Maybe I have a wasting disease,” Clint offers. “Something really rare and exotic. Maybe I’m incubating something terrible.” He presses a shoulder into Natasha, who pushes him away reflexively. “Maybe I’m contagious and everyone in SHIELD will catch it and die.”

“No matter what Fury _says_ , he loves those goddamned parties, even the dancing. _Especially_ the dancing.”

Nick somehow feels Natasha’s gaze upon his back and turns away from the serving line to stare at them. He can’t know what they’re talking about but scowls at her as a matter of course. Natasha narrows her eyes and points in his direction with her butter knife, mouths _I’m on to you_. Nick glares back, oblivious to the food server still standing patiently with a spoonful of mashed potatoes, not caring if he holds up the chow line forever, if everyone starves. Phil sighs; neither Natasha or Nick will be willing to blink first.

“Maybe I have chronic fatigue syndrome. Or mono. Or dengue fever.”

And _there_ it is. All that to give Phil a clue to where they’ve been these last weeks, because in their minds he probably hadn’t worried at all, definitely hadn’t checked up on them. _India, Phil. We were in India._

Clint can’t say it. He won’t say it. Natasha abruptly ends her staring match with Fury to glance fleetingly at Phil, because she also wants to be sure that he heard, sure that he understands.

 “You get to Medical if you don’t feel better in the morning.” Phil pushes over his carton of milk, then immediately snatches it back and opens it in concession to those broken fingers. Pushes it back again. “And _you_.” He frowns at Natasha, all stern disappointment and reproach, because he won’t say it either. _I missed you guys. I’m glad you’re back._ “Stop tormenting our poor old Director.”

 

*****

“ _Please_ tell me you’re kidding,” Phil says flatly when he sees Jasper.

Failed World Conqueror Day has the distinction of being the one agency holiday where costumes are sanctioned, Jasper Sitwell has dressed up as Red Skull for the last seven years. But tonight some wild impulse has merged with a death wish and he’s come outfitted as Nick Fury.

“You’re just upset you didn’t think of it.” Jasper snaps the eyepatch for emphasis.

“Better wipe that grin off your face; it ruins the effect.”

Phil has never dressed up, not even in his earliest years at SHIELD, but he’s done so today in concession to Clint’s enthusiasm and Natasha’s indulgent humor. Al Capone never had aspirations to conquer much more than Chicago, but Phil tells himself the spirit of the thing is close enough. Not to mention the fact that he already owned the pinstripe suit and has not nearly enough occasions to wear it.

The party’s just begun but the room is already full. Most people are in costume, and there’s everyone from famous despots to the human threats that SHIELD identified and dispatched before the rest of the world was ever the wiser. Maria Hill is dressed as Nick Fury’s former administrative assistant, who was later discovered to be a spy and failed assassin. There a few Napoleons, a spattering of Caesars and a half dozen Dr. Dooms. The room is sea of familiar faces dressed as other familiar faces—SHIELD’s unique version of Old Home Week.

Phil goes immediately to the punchbowl, where a grinning Clint Barton and a frowning Natasha Romanov are already waiting. After all his excitement Clint has come dressed only as himself, which may or may not bear thinking about later, while Natasha is some sort of popstar, if the blond wig and headset are any indication. Phil is loath to ask which one, sure that the answer is instantly obvious to everyone that isn’t him.

“Tonight’s the night,” Natasha announces in lieu of a greeting, eyeing Phil’s suit speculatively before giving it a curt nod of approval. “I’m catching the Mastermind’s minion in the act. Then the big guy goes down.” She scans the crowd for Nick Fury.

“Good luck.” Phil accepts the kool-aid Clint ladles up and then chokes in surprise, his throat burning from the overwhelming taste of Schnapps.

Natasha’s eyes widen and swing comically to Fury, who’s across the room, laughing and clapping Alexander Pierce on the back.  “How?” she demands, half enraged, half exalted. “ _How_?? He can’t have done it; I’ve been watching the whole time!” She snatches an empty cup from the table and dunks it directly into the punchbowl, takes a long swig. “Goddamnit!”

Several onlookers move immediately away, eager to be out of the radius of an angry Black Widow, but Phil knows better. There’s admiration in her anger, relief at the discovery, delight in the deception.

 

*

Everything is on the verge of falling apart.

Natasha and Phil are huddled in the back of a van and it’s not as terrible as it really should be. Clint’s out there dismantling human beings with his bow and his hands and somehow it feels like the weather should be freezing instead of just chilly, like it should be a moonless midnight instead of a sunny early afternoon. That Phil’s own hands should be shaking from the cold, that Natasha’s fingers should feel like ice as they wrap around his wrist. When she says _Phil_ he half expects the word to come in a puff of breath.

“Hmm?”

“Say we can go back.” Natasha is quiet. They can speak normally in the safety of the surveillance van, but she’s almost whispering, the words breathy, like an admission of guilt or a dying declaration. “Say that when this is over things will be like they used to be—agency conspiracy theories and laughing and eating pizza on your couch. Say that it’ll be like it was; that we can have all of it back.”

“We can,” Phil promises. “It can be however we want it to be.”

“Yeah?” Only the Black Widow can sound so hopeful and cynical at the same time.

“Yeah.”

Phil doesn’t believe that and neither does she.

They’re back in Colombia for the first time in years and it’s an ugly op, none of them happy about the amount of wetwork involved, most of which falls to Clint as a matter of course. Phil does what he can to make things better, to smooth over the sharp edges. He delivers heartfelt diatribes about weighing guilt and eating sin while Natasha frowns and Clint says less and less. Phil hands him another name, and another, and another, and Clint never argues, he never says no, but there’s a growing mix of disappointment and accusation in his eyes.

Phil and Natasha wait while Clint goes out. Goes out again. And again. And again. The word is in his eyes and in the set of his shoulders—Clint never _says_ no but it’s in their future, that refusal, and when it comes it’s going to tear their team and friendship apart.

Phil keeps saying _Just one more_ and handing over files—each time hoping that it’s true, that this is the last name on the list, that Nick won’t call and add another. It won’t last forever; this op will end and they’ll go home. And that _no_ will fade back into the background, the way it always has been before.

Natasha is skilled at so many things but has little talent for bridging the gap that’s growing between them. In between hits she finds the telenovela that they watched so long ago and the three of them try to recapture that old magic, but what was lighthearted and effortless before feels forced and artificial now.

Juan Carlos Martinez Esperanza, his mustache as glorious as ever, is still on the show, and the devious Ines de la Torre Gomez Rodriguez has indeed returned, exactly as Phil predicted. But when the lovely Luz Eugenia, an innocent teenager five years ago, appears on the screen as the current villain, Natasha sighs aloud and Clint announces that he’s tired, that he’s going to bed. Phil watches the formerly wide-eyed Luz all but cackle over some nefarious scheme, and something about the whole thing rings a muted bell of hurt, even though he doesn’t quite understand why. 

 

*

They return to headquarters and deliever the most mechanical, dispassionate debrief in the history of SHIELD, Barton leaving the room immediately after signing his name.  Natasha takes off after him and Phil goes back to his office. He sighs at the work that’s accumulated in his absence and knows he’ll have plenty of time to tackle it; he won’t be having any visitors for a while. Maybe a long while.

 So it comes as a pretty big surprise when a note arrives the next morning.

_You have been chosen._

 

*

Phil has never been to either of their living quarters; in all these years they’ve always come to him. He’s wondered about it sometimes, imagining what their homes would look like—he pictures Natasha living in an clean oasis of calm while Clint’s space would be a cacophony of knickknacks and arrows littering every flat surface. He’s so sure of that image that when Clint waves him inside Phil’s brain first stutters over and then wholly rejects the blank walls and spotless tiled floor, the standard SHIELD-issued anonymous furnishings. Phil turns a careful circle, taking in the spartan surroundings, unable to reconcile them with a man with such a big personality, as if Clint doesn’t really live here at all, as if he plans to evaporate at any moment.

He recovers just enough to bounce the crumpled up note off Clint’s forehead, the archer snagging it before it can fall to the ground, and while what Phil wants to say is _I’m so sorry_ what comes out is a much safer “I got your message.”

Clint shrugs one shoulder, smile still a little hesitant, as unable as Phil to slide back into easy banter after so many weeks of tension. “I didn’t figure I should send alcohol in the interoffice mail, but don’t worry; I’ve got a bottle of Stoli stashed here for you. The Mastermind _never_ cheaps out.”

“It can’t be you,” Phil says, but even as he says it he knows it’s true. That Clint is, somehow, against all logic, the Mastermind. None of it makes any sense. “I have three of those notes tacked up on our conspiracy board—Nat and I would know your handwriting anywhere!”

 “That’s why Patty writes the notes. All but this one.” Clint smooths the wrinkled paper out against his thigh, and his grin is warmer, a little more genuine, as he waits for Phil to put it all together.

There’s only one Patty in SHIELD, Patty Zavala, a rather humorless woman that works in Accounts Payable who rails against people stealing her pens and sends every email with a read receipt. It’s hard to picture her helping Clint out with anything _work_ related, much less participating in anything as ridiculous as—

“There’s more than one Mastermind,” Phil declares, and Clint just shrugs, because of _course_ there is. The punch spiking pre-dated his SHIELD career and continued in spite of all his mission-related absences.  “Just how many of you are there??”

“Three, usually. Patty took over from Mike Porter a few years back. You remember Mike? He was in maintenance, did all the air conditioning. But these days it’s just me and Patty and—”

“Jasper Sitwell,” Phil realizes incredulously, and pinches the bridge of his nose, unable to hold back a grudging laugh. And then he can remember it all so clearly, a years-younger Clint Barton with his leg casted all the way to his thigh, fighting over a stapler with Natasha and chirping _It’s him. It’s Sitwell, he’s the guy_. Back when Phil hadn’t known Clint well enough to be instantly suspicious, hadn’t known how to ask the right questions. “Goddamnit, Barton. You even _told_ me that—practically on the first day!”

 “I wanted to tell you and Nat so badly. I’d decide it was time— _past_ time, really—to come clean, but then I would always change my mind at the last minute.” Clint folds the note it into something small and neat and sticks it in his pocket. Maybe he’ll burn it later, in true spy fashion. Or maybe even eat it. “At first it was all about the thrill of getting away with something, but then later you and Nat and I had so much fun hunting the Mastermind. I didn’t want to ruin that. I couldn’t.”

Phil sees himself pressed against walls and questioning shadowy informants, pressing theories and names and wild conjecture against his office walls. Those post-it notes and bits of string are long since buried under maps and memos and OSHA posters, but they’re still there beneath it all, the foundation that made the rest of it possible.

“So I kept on with it. For myself, for you…but mostly for Natasha. We live in an ugly goddamned world, Phil—there aren’t many innocent things for a Black Widow to laugh about.”

“So why tell me now?”

“Because you always want to make things better for everyone. You want to fix everything and you can’t. But I’ve thought of a way that you can still help.” And Clint smiles, the sunny, scheming expression that Phil knows and loves so well—his gossiping smirk, his soaps-in-the-breakroom grin.  “Phil Coulson, will you help me and Patty and Jasper engineer the means for the entirety of SHIELD to let down their guard, cut loose, and get absolutely shitfaced?”

Phil’s in, of course. He’s been in since the moment he tripped over Clint Barton’s outstretched legs or stood on the hem of Natasha Romanov’s ballgown.

“Is there a secret club handshake?” he asks hopefully, “How do you guys coordinate and plan—leave each other messages with invisible ink? Do you use decoder rings?”

Clint shrugs. “We email, usually.”

Phil Coulson rubs his hands together, already anticipating Natasha’s delight and Nick Fury’s anger. “Well. I think we come up with something a little more exciting than that.”

 

*

** EPILOGUE **

 

Loki takes everything away when he takes Clint. Natasha fights and brings him back, but can’t do the same for Phil, who is dead.

Except that he isn’t.

He lays in a hospital bed surrounded by people he doesn’t know, wondering at his broken body and abrupted life, until one night he wakes up to the weight of familiar bodies on either side of his, opens his eyes to Natasha’s red hair. She’s burrowed into his neck and shoulder, close enough that he can feel her breath on his skin, her eyelashes tickling against his jaw. He moves his head carefully, not wanting to dislodge her, not wanting to _lose_ her, but needing to see if—his choked cry of relief breaks the silent spell as Phil catches the edge of Clint’s profile in his field of vision, looking tired and pinched but _himself_ again.

“They said you were dead,” Natasha scoffs gently, nudging Phil’s knee with her own. “But we knew better, didn’t we, Hawkeye?”

“How?” Phil thought he was dead also.  “ _How_ did you know?”

Clint lays an arm carefully across Phil’s stomach to grab Natasha’s hand, hooking his chin over Phil’s shoulder. “Don’t you remember the first rule of soap opera land? If you don’t see a body go in the ground, it means the person can still be alive. Their loved ones can go and get them back.”

 


End file.
